Mick McCleery's video: Paws of Fury 2017 - a 48 hour film project Philadelphia PA

Required Elements (Philadelphia 48-hour Film Project - 2017) Winner! - Best Choreography Genre: Detective & Martial Arts Character: Kayla Greentree - Certified Mixologist Prop: Thread Line of Dialogue: "I can't wait." OR "I cannot wait." THE PLOT: Aging and gruff Detective O’Brien takes on an eager young recruit to crack an evil dognapping ring. THE STORY (behind the movie): The Summer of 2017 saw me ‘teamless’ for the first time since I started doing these 48-hour film projects back in 2010. Gary and Mike had gotten married (*not to each other) and they were looking to pull back from the movie game. For some years before this, a group of my old High School students who went by the team name ‘The Last Minute Congress’ had been entering the fest as our competition. I figured I’d see if they wanted to team up for this year's fest (their existing team and my new team that I was trying to cobble together). They were game so we joined forces! The kick-off for the fest was in Manayunk and we all headed out there to get the required elements and our genre. We had drawn ‘Detective Film’ or ‘Martial Arts’ - and right away it seemed like a good idea for it to start as a detective movie and sort of switch gears halfway through and become a martial arts film. TECHNICAL STUFF: We used the Panasonic GH4 for the majority of the shooting along with a couple of matching dash cams for the car stuff (though we recorded audio ‘double system’ and laid it back in in the edit - Those dash cams have terrible audio!). One issue we had with the dash cams is that even though they were meant to be 30 frames per second for some reason one of them was only shooting at 15. Just goes to show - test your equipment! THINGS TO ‘CLEAN UP’ (maybe… someday): The cutting off of the hand scene was a little rushed as we were running out of time - I think I could have pulled a better ‘clean background plate’ if I took the time to pour through the footage more carefully - as it was I just had to grab something quick (and even thought that we had shot a specific Background plate for this shot but it was nowhere to be found - we prob didn't record it). Also, I have found some software called ‘Twixtor’ that does a pretty good job at basically creating extra frames between frames (mostly for cleaner slow motion from non slow-mo footage) so I would like to clean that up. Also, some background sounds could be cleaned up with the denoise function… I’ve recently fallen in love with this tool! REFLECTION: Was great to work with a bunch of my old students and it was even better to have a bunch of editors on the movie. Takes so much pressure off! An all-around fun flick and we won an award for best Choreography - which I assume is for the fight scenes and Tony's Zoomba dance moves! Until next time... m mccleery (10/17/22)